Technical Artist Greg Hendrix has been posting some quick tips for creating some simple MEL scripts and command strings, and here, shows how to create a really simple, but entirely useful randomize positions Script in MEL.
showing you how to give objects a randomized position
Greg shows how to create a script that will randomize anything that you have selected, in faces, vertices, edges or objects. There are some great tips and things to take away here as Greg walks through the script and shows how to use the -fatten flag to keep Maya from grouping names of sequential components.
Check out the tutorial for MEL Tip 003: Randomize Positions here.